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The realization of tractor bundles as associated bundles in conformal geometry is studied. It is shown that different natural choices of principal bundle with normal Cartan connection corresponding to a given conformal manifold can give rise to topologically distinct associated tractor bundles for the same inducing representation. Consequences for homogeneous models and conformal holonomy are described. A careful presentation is made of background material concerning standard tractor bundles and...

For the geometry of oriented $(2,3,5)$ distributions $(M,)$, which correspond to regular, normal parabolic geometries of type $(G_2,P)$ for a particular parabolic subgroup $P<G_2$, we develop the corresponding tractor calculus and use it to analyze the first BGG operator ${\Theta }_0$ associated to the $7$-dimensional irreducible representation of $G_2$. We give an explicit formula for the normal connection on the corresponding tractor bundle and use it to derive explicit expressions for this operator. We also show that solutions of this operator...